A photograph of a female elephant carrying her dead calf has won the adult grand title in the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The young photographer’s overall award went to a black-and-white image of a dung beetle at work. Both winning photographs will be among 100 images exhibited in South Kensington from Friday 16 October.
The adult winner, Italian photographer Federico Veronesi, made The Aftermath in Namibia’s Huab River Valley. He had been following elephant tracks when he noticed drag marks in a dry riverbed. The marks led him to a family group and the female carrying the calf, whose leg was caught between her tusk and trunk.
The image records a difficult moment without resolving what the animal experienced. Elephants have been observed guarding, inspecting and carrying dead members of their species. Researchers have suggested such behaviour may relate to elephants’ understanding of death or could be interpreted as grief; the photograph itself cannot establish an animal’s internal state.
A second overall winner
Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year was awarded to Oscar Whitfield, a young British photographer living in Zimbabwe. His picture, Labour of Love, shows a dung beetle pushing a ball of dung. Whitfield worked at ground level and used a fast shutter speed and high light sensitivity to capture the small, moving subject in the sunlit dust.
The pair of awards marks a first for the competition: both overall winners were recognised for black-and-white photography in the same year. The adult and young titles sit alongside category awards covering subjects from urban wildlife and animal behaviour to underwater photography and photojournalism.
The competition received 65,403 entries from 121 countries and territories, a record for the event. The selected pictures were assessed anonymously by a panel whose remit included originality, technical skill, ethical practice and creativity. The winning work ranges from intimate animal encounters to images that place wildlife within broader habitats and environmental pressures.
The dung beetle picture also points to ecological work that is easy to miss. By breaking up and burying dung, beetles help it decompose and can reduce conditions that produce methane. Their activity can also limit pests affecting livestock and wildlife. These are broader roles of dung beetles, rather than effects measured in Whitfield’s single photograph.
Exhibition opens on Friday
The exhibition at the Natural History Museum runs from 16 October 2026 until 11 July 2027. Its 100 selected images offer visitors a journey through different environments, while accompanying interpretation is intended to connect the photographs with changes affecting the planet’s habitats.
One part of that context is the Biodiversity Intactness Index, a measure of how much of a region’s natural biodiversity remains, expressed on a scale from zero to 100 per cent. The index provides a way to discuss broad ecological change alongside individual photographs; it does not mean that any one winning image represents a complete picture of a species or ecosystem.
Wildlife photography can make animal behaviour visible to audiences who may never encounter it directly. These two winners also show the range of scale in the natural world: a large mammal carrying its calf, and a beetle moving a resource on which other parts of an ecosystem depend. The exhibition brings both stories into view as the museum’s annual display returns to London.
