Looks as if news on the upcoming Spore projects won’t resume until next year, pity.  But not all is bad, Spore is still going strong with its many contests taking place.  MaxisCactus kicked off a new one earlier – Maxis is teaming up with Battlefield Heroes to bring you the Wild Pet Spore Challenge!  The contest is simple – to sum it up all you need to do is create a real-life based creature that is small enough to sit or stand on your shoulders.  Think you’re up for the challenge?  Read more about it here (or below):

Challenge Details
Spore and another mystery game are teaming up to bring you the Wild Pet Spore Challenge! We want you to create a realistic earthly animal. It can be a commonly domesticated animal or a wild animal. It should be posed in a regular idle stance, not sitting or in motion. The pet should be a non-human and should represent an animal small enough to fit on a human’s shoulder. Make the best realistic pet creature in the Spore Pet Challenge!

Birds, small reptiles, rodents, and other small mammals are good choices for pet ideas to get you started.

Example creations:

What will the challenge winner(s) get?

A chance to be featured on Spore.com! We’re going to choose a few of the top voted creations to share the glory here.

We’ll post our favorite submissions here, then YOU get to vote for which one is your top pick! The winner(s) may be featured if they meet our criteria for featured creations

• Creation must not have any parent authored by a different creator
• Creation must not have any offensive creation in its lineage (any parent or child creations)
• Creation must not have any links or references to other sites in the submission’s tags, name, or description

Submissions that do not meet the above criteria will not be considered for the poll

Rules:
• Your creation must look like a realistic animal
• Your creation must be created in the creature editor editor only.
• To submit a creation, just publish and tag it with: mcpetchallenge and pet
• You can submit as many creations as you’d like
• All submissions must be in by 11:00am PDT Jan 5, 2010
• Optional: Post screenshots or YouTube movies of your creation on the forum