Italian photographer Federico Veronesi wins Wildlife Photographer of the Year with 'gut punch' elephant grief shot
Published 14 October 2026, 10:21
Federico Veronesi captured a female elephant in Namibia's Huab River Valley holding a dead calf between her tusk and trunk — a photograph that won him the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year title from a record 65,403 entries across 121 countries. Researchers subsequently told him the elephant may not have been the calf's mother, as she had previously been observed carrying the dead calves of other females. Veronesi described it as the most "heart-wrecking and fascinating" encounter of his 20-year career.
• Jury chair Kathy Moran described the image as an 'emotionally gut punch' and 'proof that animals have cognition.'
• British teenager Oscar Whitfield, 14, took Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year with a monochrome image of a dung beetle.
• The exhibition opens at the Natural History Museum in London on Friday 16 October, then travels to venues across the UK and internationally.
An adult elephant grips a limp calf between trunk and tusk, holding its body aloft in Federico Veronesi's winning shot — later raising questions over whether she was even the calf's mother.A coyote picks its way along a bare dirt hillside in Bernal Heights Park, San Francisco's skyline and bay spread across the horizon behind it.Two clusters of yellow-green slime mould fruiting bodies perch on slender reddish stalks above a decaying surface, among 65,403 entries competing for the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year title.A dead puma is draped across a wire fence strung between two wooden posts on the open Patagonian steppe, displayed as a hunting trophy amid wide grassland and a cloudy sky.Hundreds of small birds blur into golden streaks among tall, pale-trunked trees at night, their motion creating the illusion of glowing foliage across the darkened woodland.A robber fly clutches a flesh fly in its forelegs while feeding, the prey's vivid red eyes and the predator's bristled mouthparts filling the frame in microscopic detail.Dozens of bioluminescent mushrooms sprout from a rotting log on a dark forest floor, their stems glowing vivid yellow under ultraviolet light while blue-grey caps hover above.An aerial view looks straight down onto a brightly lit rectangular fishing platform surrounded by white lights in pitch-dark water, a whale shark visible as a pale shape swimming just beneath the surface alongside it.A pale scorpion raises its curved tail from dark desert sand as it burrows into a dune, one of 65,403 entries competing for the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year title.A California newt clings vertically to a submerged plant stem in murky amber water, its spotted underside and egg-covered vegetation clearly visible beneath the surface.A coyote pauses mid-stride on a sun-baked dirt slope in Bernal Heights Park, its tawny coat and alert ears silhouetted against San Francisco's dense residential neighbourhoods and the bay beyond.A dark-bodied Abbott's moray eel curls its spotted, sinuous form against a black void, jaws agape around a smaller snake eel it is consuming.Two large water monitor lizards tear apart a fish carcass on a grassy lakeside bank, city skyscrapers rising through the trees behind them.A blackbird's silhouette perches on a diagonal branch amid misty blue-green foliage, its beak open mid-song, one of 65,403 entries competing for the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year title.Two juvenile shoebill storks jostle in a waterlogged swamp, one wings raised and gripping green vegetation, the other trailing dark plant matter, in an entry from the record 65,403 submissions.A single eye and a patch of cracked red octopus skin peer from behind a broad kelp frond, its yellow-green surface dimpled with circular sucker imprints.An elephant, two giraffes and a group of zebras crowd a shallow waterhole together, captured in black and white by Federico Veronesi, the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year.A bumblebee hovers mid-flight beside tall white wildflowers with red-budded stems, one of 65,403 entries competing for the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year title.A dung beetle, swarmed by tiny flies hovering in its wake, labours to roll a ball of dung twice its own size across a dusty surface in this stark monochrome close-up.Read today's full feed at The Newshound →
