Didn't Ridley say that the movie's creature is the xenomorph's ancestor

I think he was getting at it would be more of a pure form of the Xeno, without the human factor thrown in. Maybe even more insect like. Which when you think about it, could be cool.

In an interview Scott said it's all about going back not going forward. He says we will see Alien DNA which the keen fan will recognise. There will be no Xeno's but a 'progenitor' to the xenomorph. I'm keen to see what the nasty thing is we haven't seen before as this may be completely new...........

@CharlieDon't Surf Which kinda makes you wonder whether the Xeno is supposed to get more & more human..

@Bellaisanalien has it right.

We may see several variations of the Xeno. I've read where Ridley has said it will be bigger than the Xeno from the original Alien movie, but I've also heard him say it will be smaller and more insect like?

thats what i meant by ancestor - it came before the xenomorph. but still you can always see a little bit of the parents in a child and vice versa....

Why is it necessary that Prometheus has a "progenitor" of the xenomorph from Alien? Will anyone be upset and disappointed if the film doesn't reference the xeno at all? I'm fine without a reference to the xenomorph. I'd be satisfied to simply explore the Space Jockey and its world.

I'm fine with either...I just find this whole exercise exciting, interesting and entertaining....

it might not even be a big element of the flilm..say we just see the proginator in a tube or somthing in some lab

Seeing the progenitor in a tube would be really cool. It conveys the idea that this species subjugated their ancestors and usurped their power like in the Greek myths. I have a feeling that the engineering life aspect is about the terraforming of worlds to allow evolution to happen, but also possibly referencing the aliens fictionally advancing our species from ancient homo sapiens to modern homo sapiens in the past; as the movie's explanation for the 200cc increase in cranial capacity questioned by archaeologists. I think the other creations, the monsters, had their evolutionary capacity increased to a greater extent than humans, and can now immediately adapt and take on the characteristics of the life-form they infect, passing them on to other stages of the creature, as well as other generations, until something it bonds with stabilizes the creature's rapid evolutionary advancements and turns it bio-mechanical... however the creature still retains the ability to inherit characteristics from the life-forms it infects to a minor degree, and continues to change shape as new monsters are spawned.

Remember that Scott has always thought of this thing as a weapon, and the ship it was found in as a carrier for that weapon. It always bothered me that the xenomorph life cycle was very well adapted to humans, a species that it had ostensibly never encountered before. The size and morphology of the facehugger, the fact that it feeds Kane oxygen (when there is very little O2 on the planet it was found on and it somehow knew that humans use THAT molecule as a crucial part of their metabolism), even the apparent need for a relatively large abdominal cavity that could be closely accessed from the digestive or respiratory system, all points to the fact that these things had encountered humans or human-like beings before. I think what the crew in Prometheus will encounter will be the "blank slate" for this weapon, a creature that hasn't yet adapted itself to the human species. They find it, unwittingly begin the adaptation process, and also set the ship we see in the trailer to begin traveling to Earth. A subverted crew member could allow this to happen. When the uncorrupted crew members realize what is about to happen, they try to destroy the ship as we see it happening in the trailer. The Nostromo crew finds this creature many years later, and it is already adapted to them and wipes out all but Ripley in a very short period of time. There was an intriguing concept in the movie "Supernova" (an otherwise awful film). In this movie, the crew of a medical ship finds a man in possession of a strange alien artifact. They analyze the artifact and theorize that it is a weapon created by a very advanced alien race. It is essentially a bomb, but it has strange effects on those it comes in contact with, one being that it produces an almost psychotic obsession to possess the artifact in whoever finds it. They go on to speculate that it is a pre-emptive weapon against competing spacefaring races left behind by its creators. The idea here is that a species would find it, bring it home, and it would then explode and wipe them out. Along similar lines, the xenomorph creators leave behind a bioweapon that specifically adapts to any species intelligent enough to find it, and then seeks out their place of origin. That is all speculation of course, but this is sort of how I think things might unfold.

I say the Xenomorphs are a TERRAFORMIN BIOMECHANICAL WEAPON created by the Engineers to Conquer New Worlds

Ultimately I hope to see something more alien than the imagination can handle; including the horrible technological manipulations for terrorforming of the masses. The xeno's tails and tubules on their suggests a reptilian connection, something ancient...like before the time of dinosaurs? [img]http://adventurevisual.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/AlienDinosaurRoughs02.9463412_std.jpg[/img] [img]http://www.theastralworld.com/aliens-ufos/pics/dinosauroid.jpg[/img] [img]http://www.fogs.com/static/uploads/images/605_undefined/image.file.853c975900500193.372e6a7067.jpg[/img]