SimEarth was a game created by Maxis, the creators of such games as
Simcity,
SimLife,
SimAnt,
SimFarm etc... This game is really old school, it was the first game i ever installed on an ibm computer. Basically it was a similar game play style to Sim City but take on the scale of the whole
earth over the span of its
existance. You'd have to evolve life, then evolve
intelligent life, and eventually get them to sail away in big
spaceships that looked like the
Launch Arco from
Simcity 2000. The cool thing about this was that
mammals didnt always have to be the ones to reach intelligence. The mammals were annoying and tended to outcompete other stuff so you sorta had to kill them off to get anything else to do anything interesting. The neatest life form was the '
Carniferns' which were basically mobile
carnivorous plants that would co-evolve with
insects. If you were lucky, you could sometimes get them to reach intelligence by making the world inhospitable enough that only insects and carniferns could survive.
Just keeping the world in shape was hard because it tended to alternate rapidly between massive ice ages and boiling off the oceans. Eventually the sun would blow up and destroy your planet. But it was really cool cuz it got down to the scale of continental drift and weather patterns and stuff.. pretty advanced for such an old game. SimLife tried to take the biological aspects of this game to a new level, with really weird results..
.
Flamingweasel... the game you are referring to is simlife not simearth. You couldnt exert that much control over the animals in SimEarth, they just followed the route of evolution animals followed on Earth.. with the exception of the carniferns.