Ken Jennings puts out a weekly trivia email, and one of the questions last week was which two characters, on the AFI’s top 50 movie villains list, have flesh and blood, but no bones.
The answer is The Shark from Jaws, and The Terminator
But I thought the Alien (which is on the top 50 list) should also be included. They seem to have an exoskeleton, not bones. All the ones that get blown up in Aliens don’t seem to have bone fragments.
However, I believe there is an Alien “skull” mounted in one of the Predator movies. But it could just be the head? Like you’d mount a beetle?
I’d agree with you about the adult form of the xenomorph, but the face-hugger creature did seem to have bones. I think they even show an x-ray image in the first film, don’t they?
The Xenomorphs take on the shape of whatever the host to the face-hugger latched onto, so you can end up with humanoid Xenomorphs or, like in Alien3, dog Xenomorphs.
I’m pretty sure that you can see a ribcage with the humanoid Xenomorphs, implying that they’ve carried this over from the host. And I’m not entirely confident that they have exoskeletons. I think it’s more likely that they’ve simply got armored flesh in places.
Of course, if they face-hugged an octopus, they’d probably become something with no skeleton.
From a technical standpoint, I think that exoskeletons don’t work very well for large creatures. I don’t remember what the reason was, but there’s a reason that there aren’t any horse-sized ants.
Two things: Square-cube, which means proportionately sized ant legs couldn’t hold up a horse-sized ant. And breathing. Insects breathe through spiracles. No rib cage, no active breathing. A horse sized ant is too deep for air to penetrate far enough to keep tissues alive.
The Xenomorph from the original Alien had a lovingly sculpted skull (made by Carlo Rambaldi, who gave the 1976 King Kong his arms, made monsters for 1960s peplum films, and worked on various other projects). It wasn’t explicitly shown in the film, although supporting material had it, as did a plastic model of the Alien.
And, of course, what was clearly an Alien skull was shown as an in-joke at the end of Predators
The in-joke pretty soon took over, giving us Alien vs. Predator comics and, ultimately, two bad movies. So you can argue that it’s canon.
The skull implies the rest of the skeleton, in my book.
They might have an endoskeleton, but then, so do Jaws and the Terminator. Both of them count by virtue of having skeletons made of different materials than bone (cartilage and metal, respectively). But whatever a xenomorph’s skeleton is made of, it’s certainly not the same stuff as ours, and is probably a lot more dissimilar from our bones than cartilage is.
Are you sure that’s the right skull? Every image I’ve seen of the skull of the alien in the original film had a much more human-like skull, that was ultimately covered by the alien’s distinctive dome. (That’s Rambaldi standing next to the skull, btw.) This design (dome over human-like skull) was reflected in this over-sized action figure made by Kenner, which might be the plastic model you’re thinking of.
For all practical purposes Both of those have bones, as in internal skeletons.
The sharks bones are made of cartilage rather than calcified bone, the terminators bones are made of some future metal alloy.
They are still “Bones” in a skeletal sense, just not made of Bone.
From what i remember of the original aliens, they have a wierd hybrid design
(that probably would not exist in nature?)
They have some exoskeleton features, and some internal skeletal features, and a combination of internal/external organs circulatory parts etc, it actually even has some free floating, external, non exoskeletal fashion bones , which i think would have a bit of a mechanical issue to say the least.
Alien, i doubt could remotely exist as depicted.
Just makes for a good nightmare monster, especially in 1979
It’s true, and he probably should have said “flesh and blood, but not bone” to be correct.
The spirit of the question is still fine, although I’d agree that if a cartilage skeleton doesn’t count, then certainly whatever exotic material the alien’s skeleton (if it has one) is made out of doesn’t count.
One of the biology/zoology experts could no doubt explain it better but my understanding is that, with the muscles attached to the interior of the shell, the larger the animal gets the thicker the shell has to be to support the muscles which in turn leaves less room for the muscles (or the shell gets too heavy for the amount of remaining muscle space). It’s especially pronounced in the legs which are a tube of chitin filled with muscle. The largest terrestrial creature with an exoskeleton was a giant millipede that could reach up to 6’ in length but its entire body was spread out along to the ground and moved by its many, many splayed legs versus trying to stand “up” on four or six legs.
So, even if you had a horse-style with an exoskeleton and lungs (to avoid the issue of oxygen permeating the body mass) it still wouldn’t be able to move around.
