The winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition have been announced during a ceremony at London’s Natural History Museum.

Yongqing Bao, who hails from the Chinese province of Qinghai, scooped on Tuesday the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2019 award for The Moment, a striking image that frames the standoff between a Tibetan fox and a marmot, seemingly frozen in life-or-death deliberations.

Fourteen-year-old Cruz Erdmann was named Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2019 with his serene portrait of an iridescent big fin reef squid captured on a night dive in the Lembeh Strait off North Sulawesi, in Indonesia.

The two images were selected from 19 category winners, depicting the incredible diversity of life on Earth – from displays of rarely seen animal behaviour to hidden underwater worlds.

Beating over 48,000 entries from 100 countries, Yongqing and Cruz’s images will be on show in lightbox displays with 98 other spectacular photographs.

The exhibition at the Natural History Museum opens on October 18. It will then tour across the United Kingdom and internationally, including in Canada, Spain, the United States, Australia and Germany.