"Outbreak" in LV-223 Pyramid clue?

Wow, that's a really good observation! I'm going to have to re-watch it and take a look!

I remember that when everyone entered the room with the vases, the camera showed some tiny, normal looking white worms on the ground.

The, later, Millburn and Fifield were attacked by a large, white, snake/worm like variant of the organism. I figured it was the result of the pathogen incubating in a worm.

Maybe the engineers accidentally created an organism like that, managed to trap it outside, then it smashed its way back in?

@VivisectedEngineer: Two meal worms were carried in/ dispensed from the shoes of a Prometheus crew member after they entered the ampule room and it was these that became the hammerpedes.

As for what broke into the pyramid from outside, the entrance created by the shatterpoint of the curved door from outside was too small for an Engineer to fit through so it had to have been some smaller organism, more human-sized.

Teardrop aliens maybe...

@Nathan Adler - Maybe it was an Earth, or Planet 4 life form they brought there & experimented on in another temple?  The mutated being/Fifield mutant, then escaped & wiped out everyone except 'Bob', or the last Engineer?

Thanks again for your fantastic attention to detail!!

Yeah we covered this before..

It is interesting as the Prometheus Crew Enter though a area that was Small, but its part of the Larger Iris Doors that we see inside the Temple... the Concept work gives more clues

They are not this large in Prometheus though.

And indeed the debris looks like it was broken in from the Outside.. and in the Topic a last year or so, people had speculated could it had been a attack from another Faction who broke in?

Maybe...

Its quite open to debate.. another thing to take notice off is the Door they entered through the cracked part/hole in these Larger on the other side Doors... means this whole Door is Larger than the Ground Level they enter from the Outside.

The Temples have a Protective Blast Wall around them.

And on the Topic a while back i concluded in part that after Thousands of years of the Engineers not Maintaining or clearing up any Sand/Dust/Debris from the Storms that the Blast Walls were intended to keep out..  That overtime this built up to the level that it had buried the Large Door Entrances.

Now if the Storms had been so serve to cause damage to those Doors is another Question or if something else caused the damage to those Doors is up for debate.

Theories could range from Seismic Activity, Serve Storms, or a attempt to breach the Complex from the Outside from other Factors... be that a Attack or what ever.  Are all Valid Explanations.

I think having a clearly Larger Door, does show at least that the area under the Temple Mound just before the Entrance has been buried in Sand/Debris over time though.

So i would safely assume that Originally the Floor Space between the Ground and Temple Entrance as shown in the above image with the Arrow... could have been much Larger (Taller).

Evidence is shown of a lot of Erosion on the Temples Exterior over time, and so some pretty intense Storms would have caused this over a long period.... this explains why the Blast Wall is there.. to prevent a build up of Sand/Debris blocking the Entrances over time.

The Hammerpedes are a Good Point.

They clearly was not from Earth, and so had to be Native to LV-223

You would assume such a Place like LV-223 with the kinds of Experiments they was carrying out would have some kinds of Safety Protocols and Sterile Environments... as with the Black Goo you do not want Organisms coming and going around this place... it would have to be in a secure Complex behind multiple Doors.

A serve Storm that maybe compromised the Outposts Doors and allowed for those Worms to Enter is a Recipe for Disaster.

Hammerpedes come from Mutated Black Goo Worms... it appears those Worms are native and had been on LV-223 way prior to the Prometheus Mission, and so the potential in the past for Worms + Black Goo = Hammerpedes is likely.

I was always drawn to the Hammerpedes from a past event as linking to the Chest Busted Engineers and Space Jockey...   WORM's for the most part are EGG Layers and i always wondered why did the Hammerpede go into Milburns Mouth.

My in-work Prometheus re-write did show the Hammerpedes indeed had small similar Eggs to in ALIEN and Milburn did have a Chest Buster which was killed right away.

@BigDave: Do you have a link to the previous thread where this was covered (as you'll be aware I only recently registered here)?

The problem with another faction of Engineers breaking open the door from the outside is that the section they did was too small for one of them to crawl through. So are you suggesting debris from the silica storms had made the opening smaller but that when it was originally broken it went deeper so a being as tall as an Engineer height would have been able to clear the height to get in?

If you propose it was another faction of Engineers, did they kill them through release of deacons, and if so did they gather these from one of the other pyramids?  Recall deacons/ xenomorphs don’t tend to stand tall, but rather gallop like an animal, when in pursuit, and the Engineers running in the recording were looking back but not down which one would expect if it was xenos they were fleeing.  If what they were fleeing from in this recording were other Engineers, why weren’t that other group shooting at them with stun guns/ tasers if they intended to sacrifice them to deacons?

As for the final Engineer in the group who fled to the entrance to the ampule room, wasn’t he following his crewmates, and if so, why were their remains not found there by the Prometheus crew when his decapitated head had managed to be preserved for some 2,000 years?

As for the hammerpedes, we still don’t know why they were intend going down Milburn and Fifield’s throats?!  The crew found Milburn dead, as opposed to appearing to be incubating anything. While the second one had gone down Fifield’s throat, it would appear that when he fell face down into the goo that is what animated him into a xenoxombie.  So what was the purpose of the 'pedes being so intent on going down the scientists' throats?  It didn't appear that they deposit anything, so was it to eat their way out as mealworms tend to do to their predators in real life?  That is, mealworms and superworms are known to begin chewing their way out of a predator’s stomach within ten to twenty seconds of that animal swallowing them live.  Yet the xenofied mealworms did not do this to either scientist over the duration of a night!?

Nathan Adler: It doesn't clearly show that the door was broken open from the outside. The low entrance is because of time and environment (Ruins are still being found several metres under the streets of today's Rome). To me, it's more interesting why it was open at all. All other doors were automatically closed because of the outbreak . . .

@chli exactly. There should've been so many locks and doors and vaults in that/those complex/es---they obviously knew they were dealing with a weaponized chemical more dangerous than anything else known in the universe---at least to life forms.

I agree, Starlogger. As I see it, the engineers had picked LV-223 to conduct their experiments. If something went wrong (which it did) they had safety precautions (cameras and automatically sealing doors). We see the engineers running on the hologram. One doesn't make it in time and we see a heap of engineers outside another closed door.

But why was the door to the whole complex open?

A entire movie covering what went down on 223 from the engineers point of view as suggested by a YT reviewer, no humans, sub-titles for the engineers language would be superb.

Holy shit... what if the Hammerpedes were proto-facehuggers...

EDIT: It would make more sense too if the Trilobite was an attempt by the Engineers to replicate a preexisting chance organism produced naturally by the pathogen, and the Deacon was thus an imperfect replication of a naturally-occurring accelerated being/organism.