Star gazers

Scientific name : Uranoscopidae

Small fish family, belonging to the order Perciformes, with thick body, massive head, eye and mouth looking upward. Mouth is large, with fringed lips, small teeth. A venomous spine, capable of painful stings, is on both shoulders, behind the gill operculum.
The popular name, as the scientific name (Uranoscopus = the one looking at the sky) both refer to an obvious anatomic feature, the eyes looking upward. This allows the fish to hide under the sand, with only eyes and mouth exposed.
This is how we usually can observe them, if we are able to find them. It is not a common subject for fish watching.
Star gazers are encountered on sandy bottoms, usually in bay or lagoon, but they live also on deep trawling grounds. They spend most of the time staying still, partially buried, only eyes and mouth visible (on the flattened head). Preys are lured by waving worm like tentacles attached on the lower jaw.
Difficult to confound star gazers with anything else, the more obvious diagnostic is the flattened head, with upward eyes and mouth. Some scorpion fishes are somehow similar (stone fish for example), but they are never found buried in the sand this way.