Merit Prize Winner: “A Well Earned Rest in the Sahara”. This photo of Moussa Macher, our Tuareg guide, was taken at the summit of Tin-Merzouga, the largest dune (or erg) in the Tadrat region of the Sahara desert in southern Algeria. Moussa rested while waiting for us to finish our 45-minute struggle to the top. It only took ten minutes of rolling, running, and jumping to get back down. The Tadrat is part of the Tassili N'Ajjer National Park World Heritage area, famous for its red sand and engravings and rock paintings of cattle, elephants, giraffes, and rhinos that lived there when the climate was milder. Photo location: Summit of Tin-Merzouga, Tadrat, Tassili N'Ajjer National Park, Algeria. (Photo and caption by Evan Cole/National Geographic Photo Contest)

A girl shoots a gun armed with blanks at an weapon exhibition during a military show in St.Petersburg, Russia, Saturday, October 14, 2017. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)

India: A sweeper cleans the side of a road near a replica of the Eiffel Tower amid heavy fog in the early morning in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh January 18, 2010. (Photo by Ajay Verma/Reuters)

“The aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is a lemur, a strepsirrhine primate native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth and a special thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker. It is the world's largest nocturnal primate, and is characterized by its unusual method of finding food; it taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood and inserts its narrow middle finger to pull the grubs out. The only other animal species known to find food in this way is the striped possum. From an ecological point of view the aye-aye fills the niche of a woodpecker as it is capable of penetrating wood to extract the invertebrates within”. – Wikipedia

Photo: In this handout image from Bristol Zoo is seen the first captive bred aye-aye in the UK named “Kintana” (meaning star in Malagasy) April 15, 2005 at Bristol Zoo Gardens, England. The zoo announced today only the second baby aye-aye to be hand-reared in the world (the first was in Jersey Zoo) and has now made his first public appearance since his birth on 11 February 2005. (Photo by Rob Cousins/Bristol Zoo via Getty Images)

Women joke around as they pose for photographs in front of a large dragon made of flowers at the Sentosa Flowers festival on January 22, 2012 on Sentosa Island, Singapore. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Santa Claus wears a mask as he pushes a sleigh full of curbside grocery orders to an Aldi customer at a parking lot in Palatine, Ill., Saturday, December 19, 2020. For this weekend only, Santa Claus is delivering groceries to Aldi customers in Palatine and several other towns in the Chicago area. (Photo by Nam Y. Huh/AP Photo)

A man shows his inked finger after casting his ballot at a polling station during the second phase of voting of India's general elections in Masuda, Rajasthan state, on April 26, 2024. (Photo by Himanshu Sharma/AFP Photo)