About 3 to 3.35 million years ago, when sea level was several meters higher than it is today, southern Florida was submerged by a shallow tropical sea with reefs and wetlands that were home to numerous mollusks, corals, fish, mammals, and birds. Although the shell, coral, and mollusk remains are fossils and are scientifically valuable to paleontologists and geologists, there is such a large supply of them that they can be used for other purposes. The Golden Gate Quarry uses the fossil shells and coral from this ancient environment in concrete mix in the foundations of buildings and for roads and highways in the area. Take a look when you walk down the roadways in Florida and try to find the same types of fossils from the quarry as part of the road itself.

It is surprising to most people that fossils are actually used to build roads and buildings. The fossils from the Golden Gate Quarry may be mixed with rocks and used as "fill" beneath roads and highways. They may also be mixed in the asphalt and be seen at the road surface. Rock and fossils from this ancient reef may also be used in producing cement, the glue of concrete. The concrete used to make curbs and gutters will contain these materials, and if you look closely, you can find shells and corals mixed in these products.

While some fossil corals from the Precambrian (more than 540 million years ago) have been found, they are not abundant until later. By about 450 million years ago, several groups of corals were common on Earth. Early corals included Rugosa and Tabulata corals, both with calcite skeletons. Some Rugosa (the horn corals) were solitary, while others lived in large colonies. Tabulata formed colonies with hexagonal patterns like honeycombs. Sponges and bryozoans were still the main reef builders, but these colonial corals gradually surpassed them. The Permian corals went extinct at the end-of-Permian mass extinction event, but soft-bodied, anemone like animals (“naked corals”) survived. Naked corals gave rise to modern calcified corals (scleractinians), formed when they adapted t geochemical changes in the ocean by secreting stony skeletons. During the Triassic (about 250 million years ago), stony corals assumed their role that continues today as the main reef builders on Earth.