Electronic Arts announced today that over 250,000 animals have been shared with the Spore Creature Creator in the first 24 hours. Players can use the title to create animals for Spore. The Spore Creature Creator can be found at retail for $9.99 with a downloadable trial version (with 25% of the creature parts) available for free at www.spore.com.

"The response to the Spore Creature Creator has been overwhelming," said Lucy Bradshaw, executive producer of Spore at Maxis. "The creativity and passion that the community is putting into their creatures is spectacular. The development team has spent the last 24 hours checking out the amazing creations racing in from all corners of the globe - with peak volume hitting more than 1,000 creatures being shared a minute."

The full version of Spore will launch September 7, 2008 in North America.

Update: As of 4:30PM (Eastern) the creature count has risen to more than 442K and will no doubt reach 500K quite soon.