---
title: Righteye flounders
scientific_name: 
common_name: Righteye flounders
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:57:19.950Z
tags: Righteye flounders, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/righteye-flounders
---

# Righteye flounders

## Quick facts

- **Body shape:** Flattened - Pressed flat top-to-bottom, lies on the bottom - rays, flounders, crocodilefishes.
- **Species listed here:** 2

## How to recognise this group

- flattened body, oval to diamond-shaped
- both eyes located on right side of head
- resting flat on sandy or silty bottom
- cryptic, camouflaged body patterns

One of the two species listed here is a flatfish that stopped halfway.

The Indian halibut belongs to the oldest branch of the flatfishes, the family that sits outside all the others on the tree, and it still carries equipment the rest of them threw away. There are true spines at the front of the dorsal and anal fins, where every other flatfish has nothing but soft rays. The dorsal fin starts behind the eye instead of running forward over the snout. The mouth is large and full of sharp teeth, and the migrating eye stops on the ridge of the head rather than coming round to sit beside its partner.

It has not committed to lying down either. This fish will swim upright like any ordinary fish, well clear of the bottom, and hunt that way after dark, which no sole and no true flounder does. Nor has the species settled on a direction: individuals turn up right-eyed and left-eyed in roughly equal numbers, which is what you would expect of a lineage that never standardized. It reaches 64 cm (25 in) and about 9 kg (20 lb), the largest flatfish anyone is likely to meet in this sea, and it is fished and eaten across its range.

The other fish here is the opposite animal. The cockatoo flounder is small, thin and right-eyed in the ordinary way, and the first few rays of its dorsal fin are drawn out into a crest that it holds up clear of the sand while the rest of it lies flat. What the crest is for has never been settled.

Two species is a thin heading, and the arithmetic explains it rather than the sea: most of the flatfish here are left-eyed, and the right-eyed ones are mostly soles, which have a page of their own.


## Species (2)

- [Cockatoo Flounder (Samaris cristatus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/righteye-flounders/cockatoo-flounder)
- [Indian Halibut (Psettodes erumei)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/righteye-flounders/indian-halibut)

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/bony-fishes/righteye-flounders)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*