How one leopard changed its spots ... and saved a baby baboon

She is the ultimate predator - a sleek and stealthy killer. Pouncing on her prey, she silences the baboon with one swipe of a vicious paw. Then, suddenly, something stirs in the dead animal's fur, and the law of the jungle is rewritten.



From the bedraggled pelt of her kill crawls a tiny infant - a one-day-old baboon. In that moment, this young leopard forgets she is a hunter, and nurtures the baby baboon as if it were her own cub.



Smelling blood, a pack of hyenas gather to finish off the kill. Legadema, as she has been named by the camera crew who took these moving shots, carefully carries the baby baboon high up into a tree for protection. There, she cuddles the newborn to her for warmth through the long, African night.

Tragically, when morning came, the camera team realised that the tiny baboon was no longer showing signs of life. "We think it was simply too small to survive the night without its natural mother and the sustenance she could provide," said filmmaker Dereck Joubert. "As the sun came up, Legadema realised that the baby had died, and moved on."

There are a couple more photos here.