A flounder looks like a hallucination of a fish. Its body is flat as a pancake, its head permanently tilted to one side, and instead of having one eye on each side of its head, both eyes are crowded on one side.
One species, the Pacific halibut, can grow to the size of a barn door. The bizarre bodies of flatfish have long puzzled biologists.
In fact, Charles Darwin's critics used it as evidence against his theory of evolution.
St. George Jackson Mivart, a British biologist, used flatfish as Exhibit A: It seemed impossible to him that the slow migration of the eye around the fish's head would be advantageous at every stage along the way.
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