[title]
Last week, London’s Natural History Museum announced that Marcio Cabral had been stripped of the 2017 ‘Animals in their Environment’ category of the Wildlife Photographer of the year award.
The museum started sniffing around following an anonymous tip-off that the Brazilian photographer had not captured an anteater having a cheeky midnight snack from a termite mound, but instead posed the taxidermy anteater usually found at the entrance to Emas national park in Brazil.
For his part, the photographer claims he simply in the right place at the right time to see the long-nosed creature irl. The NHM called in a team of experts on mammals, taxidermy, anteaters and more to make their decision. But even without a PhD in vermilingua, the visual similarities between the creature in the award-winning photo and its taxidermy friend are enough to knock the stuffing out of you.
Wildlife photography is a notoriously dog eat dog world or, rather a dog eat tamed/stuffed/glued/posed dog world. Cabral denies all wrongdoing and, who knows, maybe that’s just how all anteaters like to stand.
Find out more about the Wildlife Photographer of Year Award, click here.