More amazing image galleries of the year:
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2012: Weird and wonderful pictures
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- Indoors if wet
- Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde won acclaim for creating clouds in empty rooms with a fog machine. (Courtesy: Berndnaut Smilde and Ronchini Gallery)
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- Whale Madrid
- Two Beluga whales play with a football at the Beijing Aquarium in May. (Copyright: AFP/Getty Images)
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- Home-made plane
- Chinese farmer Zhang Xuelin spent 11 months – and the princely sum of £200- building a motorcycle-plane. But the aircraft failed to get off the ground. (Copyright: Reuters)
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- One lump or two?
- The latest sensation for coffee connoisseurs – beans plucked from elephant dung. They don’t come cheap, however – they retail at $1100 (£680) per kilo. (Copyright: Getty Images)
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- Panda porters
- Workers wear panda costumes as they carry a box to transport Giant Pandas back to the wild at a nature reserve near Wolong, China. (Copyright: AFP/Getty Images)
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- Picking a winner
- This otter, named Ferret, picked Germany as the winner against Denmark at Euro 2012 his enclosure in Aue, eastern Germany. They beat Denmark 2-1. (Copyright: AFP/Getty Images)
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- Peeping Tom?
- A rare Tiger Cat peers from its enclosure at a zoo in Mulhouse, eastern France. The Tiger Cat lives in South and Central America. (Copyright: AFP/Getty Images)
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- Prehistoric baby
- The well-preserved body of a baby woolly mammoth, nicknamed Lyuba, went on show in Hong Kong in April. The body is thought to be 42,000 years old. (Copyright: Getty)
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- Holding the pose
- Yoga teacher Tao Porchon-Lynch showed no sign of giving up yoga – becoming the Guinness World record holder as the oldest yoga teacher at the age of 93. (Copyright: Reuters)
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- All dressed up...
- Two attendees of this year’s Comic Con in London in October, dressed as characters from the video game Journey. (Copyright: Getty Images)
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Some of the year's more off-the-wall pictures, including a clever otter, football-playing whales... oh, and men dressed as pandas...
