Hello once again, friends, and welcome to episode 116 of Just the Zoo of Us. This week, a spectacular

evolutionary biologist is here to talk about the dimensionally innovative flatfish. Get ready to

learn the story of why these quirky fishes developed such peculiar body plans and how their

bizarre adaptations help them live their best life

beneath the sand. We are going to talk migrating eyes, transient feet, and which cartoons got

flounders right and which ones got them wrong. So stick around to the end for announcements,

plugs, and a sneak peek at next week's episode. Without further ado, Just the Zoo of Us. This is your favorite

animal review podcast. I'm so excited to introduce to y'all a new friend for today. This is Dr. Corey Evans.

Say hello, friend. Hello, Ellen. How you doing? And hello everybody else. I'm great and I'm so excited to talk to you.

We're talking about a very under-hyped fish today, I think. You've brought a very fascinating

and maybe not like the world's most what people think of when they think of a charismatic

fish. Maybe not. But hopefully we can hype them up a little bit today. But before we talk about our flatfish today, tell us a little bit about the kind of work that you do over at Rice University.

Okay, cool. Yeah. So I'm an assistant professor at Rice University. I just started there now two years ago. So I study the evolution of fishes and the evolution of morphology. So what that means is that I'm really interested in how traits have changed over time over

the course of millions of years and how we get like current patterns of basically morphological

diversity that we see today. So that involves a lot of going to the field, catching fish,

figuring out what they're eating because sometimes

like different aspects of ecology can have some really kind of marked influences on why animals

look the way they do.

And then we spend a lot of time kind of collecting morphological data.

In my case, using a micro CT scanner, which many people might have experience with.

If you go to the doctor's office, you might have an MRI or a CT scan,

we can create these really nice three-dimensional images of skull structures or basically just the inside of an object.

...