These wildlife photography finalists will take your breath away

Nature is a beautiful, brutal place.

The 16 "highly commended" entries in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2020 Awards, run by the Natural History Museum in London, provide colourful — and sometimes shocking — proof of this.

The finalists feature everything from endangered species in Vietnam to out-of-control forest fires in Brazil. Some are beautifully-captured vignettes of life in the animal kingdom, while others provide evidence of the devastating impact human beings are having on the earth.

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SEE ALSO: Incredible photo of mice battling on a London Tube platform takes top prize

The winners will be announced on Oct. 13, but it'll be a hard task for the judges. Here are the finalists:

A grey reef shark cruising alongside molluscs over the Fakarava Atoll, in French Polynesia. Credit: laurent ballesta Tall Araucaria trees piercing through a beech forest in Chile's Araucanía region. Credit: Andrea Pozzi A squirrel makes its escape from a pair of Ural owls in a forest on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Credit: Makoto Ando An encounter with an endangered red-shanked douc langur near Vietnam's Son Tra Nature Reserve. Credit: Arshdeep Singh An out of control forest fire in Maranhão state, northeastern Brazil. Credit: Charlie Hamilton James A hippopotamus in the drought-stricken Mara River, in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve. Credit: JoseFragozo Two foxes tussle over a dead rat in a North London allotment. Credit: Matthew Maran A large male gharial provides a raft for his offspring in the National Chambal Sanctuary in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. Credit: Dhritiman Mukherjee A brown bear snatching a salmon in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. Credit: Hannah Vijayan Two possums hiding beneath the roof of a holiday park shower block in Yallingup, Western Australia. Credit: Gary Meredith A large wandering spider devouring the egg of a giant glass frog in Manduriacu Reserve, northwestern Ecuador. Credit: Jaime Culebras A pair of Atlantic puffins, captured on the Farne Islands. Credit: Evie Easterbook Yellow-billed choughs on the Alpstein Massif of the Swiss Alps. Credit: Alessandra Meniconzi A section of Mildred Lake Tar Mine in Northern Alberta, Canada — an area that used to be boreal forest. Credit: Garth Lenz The dark reality of the bushmeat market, taken at the Tomohon Market in northern Sulawesi, Indonesia. Credit: Quentin Martinez A memorial to the albatrosses caught by the longlines of Japanese tuna-fishing boats of the coast of South Africa. Credit: Thomas P Peschak

If you happen to be in London, the images will be displayed in an exhibition at London's Natural History Museum from Friday, Oct. 16.

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