If David created the classic xenomorph, how did thousands of eggs get aboard the derelict ship in the original Alien?
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Ati
MemberPraetorianFebruary 02, 2018'There are currently two schools of thought on that: one where David was the first to create the classic Xenomorph, and one where he simply recreated a process via his experimentation that others had already mastered. And which theory is correct depends on the age of the derelict ship in Alien (1979).
It is often presumed that the derelict ship found on LV-426 in Alien had been there for thousands of years because Dallas makes a comment about the corpse of the pilot looking "fossilized". However, as Prometheus highlighted, the Engineers wear a suit and helmet that resembles an exoskeleton, and so this may appear to look like fossilized remains when in actuality it isn't (the crew of the Nostromo did not make a thorough examination of the pilot, merely a brief visual inspection and an assumption). At the time, the makers of Alien kept everything about the ship purposely vague, so the pilot and derelict ship could have crashed on LV-426 much more recently, after Alien Covenant, but perhaps only years or even months before the Nostromo was rerouted there. Given the fact that Alien: Covenant takes place only 19 years before Alien, it is possible we will see the derelict ship crash on the planet in a future film.
If we assume this to be the case, then David may have created the first Xenomorph, but it should also be noted that David's version differs somewhat from the classic Alien Xenomorph in a few places. First, when it hatches, it seems to be covered in some kind of amniotic sac, and it is already fully formed, with an elongated head and limbs. This is in contrast to the classic chestburster, which was much more snake-like and did not have limbs. As David explains, the black mutagen from Prometheus can exist in many forms: as a liquid and even in an airborn gaseous form. Different forms of the mutagen combined with different lifeforms can produce wholly different results. So far, we have seen the mutagen decimating everything in its gaseous form; it can mutate a corpse in liquid form, create snake-like creatures from worms, giant squid-like facehugger embryos inside humans, and so on. In Alien: Covenant, its airborne form can create Neomorphs directly inside a living host, completely bypassing any egg or facehugger stage. So, David's Xenomorph may have been created by a process almost, but not quite, similar to the one that would later produce the Xenomorph from Alien, but he could indeed have been the first to create a Xenomorph.
The other theory assumes that the Engineer aboard the derelict ship is fossilized, or at the very least "dead a long time", and had crashed there considerably longer than 19 years before. Some assume that it was one of the Engineer ships that left LV-223 (the planet seen in Prometheus) during the outbreak of the black substance hundreds of years before (as witnessed by the Prometheus crew in a hologram). Assuming that the ship is very old, then the Xenomorphs aboard had probably been created before David even existed, and the Engineers would be their most logical creators. They may have discovered the Xenomorph the same way David did: by experimenting with the mutagen, and combining it with insects as well as several other species from their homeworld. It is even hinted that David may have used some parts from Elizabeth Shaw's body (which seems to be lacking several abdominal organs), possibly for use in creating the Xenomorph eggs (which may explain the subtle differences in appearance between his Xenomorph and the one from Alien). David may have had many trial and error attempts to get it to that stage, but if this theory is correct, he basically recreated a process that had been mastered years or even centuries before.
All of this is speculation, as no film in the series has (yet) given exclusive evidence, but it's possible and even likely that it will be explained in the next sequel.'
Source: imdb / Alien Covenant
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2316204/
