This is the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, showing the moment two lions gently touched their foreheads together, eyes closed, and paused
The tender and unusual moment was captured by London photographer David Lloyd who spotted the cats — brothers, most likely — in Tanzania in March 2015 and trained his camera.
The resulting image, "Bond of Brothers," won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year LUMIX People's Choice Award from London's Natural History Museum.
Speaking to USA Today, Lloyd said that he has always been drawn to the perceptive nature of animals that often goes overlooked.
READ MORE: 2018- A year in photographs
"The greet lasted a lot longer than the usual three or five seconds, it was almost half a minute of nuzzle and gentle head butt," he said.
"There was no doubt the high level of emotion, feeling, respect and dependability between these two for each other."
The photograph won out of 25 images compiled by the Natural History Museum as part of its 2018 competition, which received 45,000 submissions.
"Lions are individuals with complex social bonds, and David’s winning picture provides a glimpse into their inner world," Michael Dixon, the museum's director, said in a statement.
READ MORE: Stacy’s wildlife image is picture perfect
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year's people's choice award honors outstanding nature photography as decided by the public.
Last year's winner featured a gorilla saved from a bushmeat market, resting drowsily in the arms of the man who helped rescue her.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here