The armadillo girdled lizard, Ouroborus cataphractus, is a lizard endemic to desert areas of southern Africa. It is also commonly known as typical girdled lizard, armadillo lizard, golden armadillo lizard, and armadillo spiny-tailed lizard.

Ethnic Cham Muslim people pass the time near their boats on banks of Mekong river in Phnom Penh July 29, 2013. About 100 ethnic Cham families, made up of nomads and fishermen without houses or land who arrived at the Cambodian capital in search of better lives, live on their small boats on a peninsula where the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers meet, just opposite the city's centre. The community has been forced to move several times from their locations in Phnom Penh as the land becomes more valuable. They fear that their current home, just behind a new luxurious hotel under construction at the Chroy Changva district is only temporary and that they would have to move again soon. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

Isabel Schmalenbach, an environmental scientist with the Helgoland Biological Institute (Biologische Anstalt Helgoland), part of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, holds a one-year old baby European lobster (Homarus gammarus) raised at the institute on August 3, 2013 on Helgoland Island, Germany. Later in the day Schmalenbach and her colleagues released a total of 415 one-year old lobsters into the North Sea as part of an effort to repopulate the lobster population around Helgoland (also called Heligoland). In the 19th century local fishermen caught up to 80,000 lobsters a year in the surrounding waters, combined with the heavy allied bombing of the island during and after World War II, as well as other environmental factors, decimated the lobster population. (Photo by Sean Gallup)

When it opened in 1955, the Grande Hotel in the Indian Ocean city of Beira was one of the most luxurious in Africa. Photojournalist Fellipe Abreu documents the lives of the 3,500 people who now fill this long-closed hotel to capacity. (Photo by Fellipe Abreu/The Guardian)

Underwater photographer of the year – winner. Dancing Octopus by Gabriel Barathieu (France). Location: Island of Mayotte, off the coast of south-east Africa. “Balletic and malevolent”, one judge said of this octopus, hunting in a lagoon. Barathieu waited until spring tides when there was just 30cm of water on the flats and plenty of light in the shallows. (Photo by Gabriel Barathieu/UPY2017)

Wildlife category, open shortlist. “Buffaloes and stars”. This picture, taken at Zimanga game reserve in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, used an in-camera multiple exposure, with the first lit for the buffaloes and the second focused on the stars. (Photo and caption by Andreas Hemb/2017 Sony World Photography Awards)

Tourists look at would-be immigrants at the Maspalomas beach, on Gran Canaria in Spain's Canary Islands, after some 21 would-be immigrants arrived in a fishing boat on their way to European soil from Africa, November 5, 2014. (Photo by Borja Suarez/Reuters)

A baby baboon appears to ride its mother like a horse at the Chobe River, in The Chobe National Park, Botswana, Southern Africa in January 2023. Young monkeys often ride on their parent's backs, like this Chacma baboon, for protection. (Photo by William Steel/Solent News & Photo Agency)