We assume here that algae provided the carbon for the fullerenes at the three locations of interest.
At three sites of such fullerene discoveries the building blocks for these large molecules may have come from algal remains.
A biological origin with formation in the solid state is proposed here for certain terrestrial fullerenes but with considerable trepidation because it entails formidable hurdles.
These are interesting results, but they do not involve fullerene formation under natural conditions, and certainly not in the solid state.
In both cases curved graphene sheets can be observed together with onion-like particles and defective structures which we have defined fullerene-like structures.
These fullerene occurrences have long been a conundrum.
The fullerene-like structures in carbon dust may be responsible for instance for the formation of molecular hydrogen from atomic hydrogen by an enhanced surface chemistry mechanism.
Individual gadolinium atoms have been isolated by encapsulating them into fullerene molecules and visualized with transmission electron microscope.
