The shocking image of a fox and a groundhog who won the award for the best animal photo of the year

It is a brief and tragic scene, a few seconds short, that the Chinese photographer Yongqing Bao managed to seize with patience in the Qilian mountains: the moment when a Tibetan slut attacks a marmot from the Himalayas.

Shortly after, the fox killed the groundhog to feed his three puppies. "It's nature," he says at the BBC the photographer after winning the prize best animal photo of the year 2019 awarded by the Natural Science Museum of London.

"With super-fast reactions, Yongqing captured the attack: the power of the predator who shows teeth, the terror of his prey, the intensity of life and the death that is written there", has said the institution on the photo, titled "The moment."

According to the BBC, Yongqing had yet to spend several hours on the Tibetan-Qinghai plateau to take this snapshot.

Cruz Erdmann, 14, won the Young Photographer's Award of the Year for his underwater image of an irred squid, captured during a night dive in the Lembeh Strait, in Indonesia.

Some other winning photos