After Prometheus, theories focused more on the Engineers being the creators of the savage species. Before the arrival of Prometheus, some people had speculated that the parasitic aliens were the alpha predator of their own harsh ecosystem on the planet Xenamorph Prime.

With every new instalment in the Alien franchise, new theories were put forward as to the xenomorph’s back-story, because its creators - Don O’Bannon, Ronald Shushet and Ridley Scott - had held back from actually giving it an official one. Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope) was the first one to call it the xenomorph, by putting together the Greek words for alien (xeno) and form (morph). However, like Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the rest of the Nostromo crew, we didn’t know where it came from or what it wanted - other than to kill every human it came into contact with - and it wasn’t until James Cameron's Aliens that it was given an actual name. We knew what it looked like - a ferocious-looking creature, black-skinned, with a sharp, muscular tail, a curved, oblong head, acidic blood that would melt your face off and a powerful inner jaw to knock your brain out too. When the xenomorph first burst onto our screens in Alien, in 1979, its origins were shrouded in mystery. Over the course of the movie, it's revealed that the android David (Michael Fassbender) is the creator of the xenomorph, using gruesome biological experiments to create what he sees as the perfect organism. Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Alien: CovenantĪlien: Covenant is now in theaters, and while it doesn't completely bridge the gap between Prometheus and Alien, it does answer one major question: where the franchise's titular alien came from.

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