In looking for something entirely different I tripped over Xeko... which seems to do just about everything people have wanted Phylomon to do. And yes, the species are labelled with latin binomials

Never played is personally, but you can check out lots of pictures of Xeko cards on its BoardGameGeek entry.http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26582/xeko

A few others have mentioned Xeko in the past, but most have said it tends to simplify the science down quite a bit, or at least doesn't have an avenue where one can play it with a bit more scientific rigor involved (a friend of mine said something about no microbes for instance). I think the other thing that was mentioned was that the organisms tended to be locale specific (i.e. sets so far have been limited to a few locations), which can make habitat concepts a little trickier to play out, since creatures in the set tend to live in more or less the same place.

They do, however, get good reviews on how they look - the images I've seen are quite wonderful. Not sure when it was released (after 2002 when Andrew published his Science paper). Not sure if part of the idea was inspired by his article - Andrew didn't mention anything to me.

Xeko is from 2005. It looks like they put out around one expansion a year and then went on hiatus.

I'm not quite sure I understand fully how the game was originally layedout but.....maybe it could be changed based more on a species survival.

Critters further down the food chain would need food therefore the plants they eat would need to be played(like how a pokemon needs an energy card).

Animals further down on the food chain would need to be in play before any larger predators could be played as they'd need a food source(kinda how an evolved pokemon can't be played until its first stage is).

There could be two decks with one being the deck everyone normally draws from while the other could be a "chance" deck which would contain cards that can both help and cripple wildlife (ex.oil spill, national park established). This deck could be drawn from when a player is out of moves or hopeing to draw a lucky card.

Animal cards marked as an invasive species (ex. Brown Rat) could be played by someone to put anouther players card out of the game, but in return it would give other players a chance to play animals that would prey on it.

Maybe there could be seperate decks for each enviroment since it seems hard to cover so many biomes and subjects collectivly. Like a deck for Tundra, Plains, Forests, desert, or reigons Africa, North America, ect. With each deck containing its own animals, plants, parasites, and disasters with each person needing that same deck (ex. like pokemon needs a player to have all one "type" except both players would need to have the same type).

There could be more then one of the same species in each deck. How common a card is could depend on how common the animal is in real life, where on the food chain it lies, and its color(like how some animals have color morphs that could affect thiere survival like white tigers/king cheetah).

Just some ideas, not really sure about the details.

The Xeko web site shut down at the end of September, but you can still read the rule book.