Escondido's Roynon Museum of Earth Sciences and Paleontology is closing after being open since 1998 due to financial reasons.
"I've collected this — this museum has taken me over 75 years — my whole life and my heart is in here," said museum co-owner Keith Roynon. "I don't want to see it come to a close."
The owner of the museum said every year thousands of children from schools across San Diego County come for a visit.
"We do somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,500 to 6,000 students in the county," Roynon said. He enjoys showing off his more than 5,000 artifacts — bones, fossils, and dinosaur eggs are just some of the items inside.
Roynon works the floor at the museum and enjoys talking to people about his prehistoric collection. Some of the items he said are more than 2 billion years old. Most are real and some items are replicas.
"The reason why we're having a hard time here is that our overhead is high but also we need to hire another person here," Roynon said. "We have one hired person here — all the rest are volunteers. We need to go beyond the volunteers and get another person in here."
The last day of business for the museum was going to be this Saturday, but it has decided to stay open through July 6 in the hopes of finding a donor or funding to save the museum.
"We want a benefactor here to help us and we're asking for somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 to keep this museum going," Roynon said.
A GoFundMe page has been set up by a supporter of the museum in hopes of raising money to keep it open.
Without a donor, the plan is to donate some of the items at the museum to another Southern California museum. The owners will retain some items as part of their private collection.
The nonprofit museum was started in 1998 and has been in its current location off East Grand Avenue for the last few years.
Recent coverage of the museum's closing has brought more people in to see the prehistoric exhibits.
"We're getting in here 200-300 people in here a day," Roynon said. "Which were before we were getting 30-40 a day."
