Engineers, Proto-Queen and the original parasite...

The black goop was originally created to fill plot holes.

I think the ampules do not contain all The same black goo. Fifield was not killed by the cobra, but his helmet melted From the acid/blood of the cobra. then he fell into the black goo which assimilated with his face and mutates him. holloway swalloed the black goo of one Small ampule. The squid from shaw is actually a giant Facehugger looking for a host to evolve. with the engineers dna, the creature shares Similarities with the xenomorph. But this one does not look biomechanical. maybe because it haa human dna (holloway and shaw) first.

1. there is no proof that the black goo that the Engineer drinks at the beginning of the film is the same that infects everyone else. 2. Holloway only ingest one small amount and chooses to die before we know what would truely happen to him. 3. everyone else seems to evolve into something deadly I'm guessing that the black goo contains this small worm that we see in Holloway's eye. This infects everything else. i) the larger worms which changes into the Hammerpede ii) Holloways sperm inside of Shaw into the large proto-hugger iii) Fifield into some sort of super strong human ....and the Engineer does not have to die in the chair as it is not the same Engineer from Alien. We can assume that this Engineer escaped from LV223 2000 years ago, crashed when the Xeno came out of his chest and then fossilised waiting to be discovered by the Nostromo crew.....

There are actually different forms of the black goo -- having nothing to do with plot holes -- that create different transformations. If you look closely you will be able to detect subtle differences in the appearance of the black substance. For instance, there are living critters inside the substance ingested by the Sacrificial Engineer. Similar considerations apply to the other transformations. It isn't a one size fits all plot device. Rather the black goo is prepotent stuff capable of affecting different transformations according to its composition and contents. There's a JasonDiaz at prometheusnews.net whose down some excellent writing on the subtleties of the black goo. There's also an excellent post on this site by PV666 entitled "Stealing Fire From The Gods" that provides a superb perspective for the black goo. Since most viewers are looking for xenos, predators, eggs, and the derelict they haven't seen Prometheus yet because they don't see what's on the screen, they just see the absence of the aforementioned items, cry, and call it a bad movie. Once they get over it some will see Prometheus for the first time, and wonder where their heads were when they first saw it. One thing is for sure, the black goo isn't a deus ex machina for plot holes. It is actually a conceptually sophisticated precursor to DNA that regulates DNA transformations. Best

Could it affect different Bloodtypes differently?

OK. For the record- here's my 2 cents. The Black Goo is a super stimulant for evolution- in short it increases the size, power and aggression of an organism. This can be seen by its effect when it is in contact externally with the temple worms and with Fifield (earthworms turn to muscular snakes, Fifield becomes mutated + superstrong/aggressive). However when the Black Goo is taken internally (1st Engineer, Holloway), it has the effect of massively evolving the power and capability of the hundreds of living organisms inside the digestive tract. As a result the organism is broken down, slowly in Holloway's case and very quickly when consumed in high doses such as the 1st Engineer. Shaw's baby is in effect a superevolved, aggressive organism based on a sperm cell. It's my hunch that the protoalien at the end of the film would come in contact with external black goo to attain the power, aggression and size of a tradition Alien Warrior. /end nerd hypothesis

The engineer from alien had been there for thousands of years. Xenomorphs had long since been around. The creatures we see are separate from them and that story. These creatures are not protos or firsts of anything at all if you follow the stories timeline. The "galloping dna" will be explained in the sequel I am assuming. It's qualities seem varied and unknown. I do however think the liquid david infects holloway with is different from the substance we see oozing from the jars. When he takes one apart you see there are actually 2 liquids one black one clear inside the jars. I think there is a mixure and a raw form of the goo.

Yes, the traditional alien form must already exist as it is closely depicted on the mural in the main chamber. It seems to me that whatever outbreak occurred 2000 years ago in the pyramid must have caused one of the engineers to try to escape LV423 in an alien space craft, only to later crash on LV426 as a result of an infestation/contagion- ergo giving the dead Engineer time to fossilise.

There are thousands of cans of this damned goo. They vary in size. By that token, I would say it's fair to conclude that the content [i]might[/i] be of similar but different nature and serve slightly different objectives, each case. It's certainly what I'd do if I were writing it - a thousand cans of the exact same drink would seem to be a bit of a dramatic opportunity wasted... This is maybe the one issue, of itself, that I don't see a problem in the Story: the cans. The fact that these thousands of cans all have slightly different properties and now they're all bubbling over and mixing up into deadly, intermingled DNA-toxin, sludge because some foolish and uppity android idiot left the fridge door open, only re-inforces the notion that these idiots have no idea what they are dealing with and no business being there in the first place. That seems fine to me. Of course that would completely undermine the part of the Story that calls for the company of fools to have been deliberately invited there by a picture a big alien pointing them at his star, but I find I am too tired from the overall silliness of all this Story to let that kind of small but significant inconsistency worry me the least bit - anymore than it would seem that those kinds of small but significant inconsistencies worried anyone involved in making the dratted and confounded thing in the first place. So, we're all even.