Using Harmonized World Soil data in Maxent using .bil file types

[clariss...@gmail.com]

Using coordinate data for plant species located on Madagascar, I have modeled the location of plants and bioclimate using Maxent and ArcGIS. I want to start modeling using the Harmonized World Soil data now.

Here is the link for the data I am using for soil groups based on the FAO soil classification system: http://worldgrids.org/doku.php/wiki:stghws

So the first issue I had with using the soil database is that it is in a tif.gz file type and I am not sure how to unzip or decompress the file. 

While trying to solve this issue, I stumbled upon this raster data: http://webarchive.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/External-World-soil-database/HWSD_Data/

This is in the .bil file type, rather than the .tif file type. So I am not used to using this raster file type.

I clipped the data and converted the file type into .asc in ArcGIS. I then, ran the files in Maxent with the coordinate data of one plant species, but got weird results. It's just unclear to me why the color scheme of the model is so unusual. I'm not sure if I did something wrong in the process. Could someone provide me a rundown or their own insights into how they model using .bil file types?