submission from jamiestoker:

Is the Egg chamber in Alien really a result of the chest bursting Xeno?

Kane reaches it through an entrance that looks like it was created (burnt away) by an Alien as seen above, but then the entire area looks very purpose built to house the eggs, and of course there is the lazer film that protects and activates the eggs, thus suggesting that it is some sort of cargo bay designed by the Engineers.

It is all very vague and confusing, I’ve yet to work out my own opinion of the sequencing between the end of Prometheus and beginning of Alien (as like you said they are totally different worlds anyway)

It is still all very confusing. The hole in Alien (above) does clearly look burned away, so I maintain that the eggs were laid by the xeno that burst from the space jockey that Dallas discovers; they were not the original intended cargo of the ship (although the laser field that seems to be preserving them suggests otherwise). The ship’s mission was the same as the one in Prometheus; to deliver a payload of the black mutagen goo to a planet that they had previously seeded.

All of the creatures in Prometheus looked entirely random, as if the black goo just wreaks havoc with DNA and different creatures will result each time. But xenomorphs seem to crop up again and again in space jockey history, so maybe they are a common result of the mutagen (or, if Calvalorn is correct, when the mutagen is in the presence of a “negative psychic atmosphere”).