Sign up for free

Newsletters

Once a month
get new photos
and expert tips.

Photography
Main Photo Galleries Wallpapers Photo of the Day Photographers Photo Tips Buy Prints

Viscacha, Atacama Desert, Chile, 2003

A vizcacha, close relative of the chinchilla, rests on an outcropping in Chile's Atacama Desert. These sleepy-eyed herbivores are among few species who thrive in the higher, drier regions of the Atacama. They make their living off the sparse vegetation and grasses that manage to grow in this forbidding desert.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "The Driest Place on Earth," August 2003, National Geographic magazine)

Photograph by Joel Sartore