I live with dinosaurs

The property rights of a longtime resident have come head-to-head with City of Escondido zoning laws. School buses bringing students and scouts to a local museum will no longer be allowed to park in the cul-de-sac in front of Keith Roynon’s Escondido home after June 30, 2015.

Both community planning director Barbara Redlitz and fire chief Mike Lowry have told Roynon that he must shut down his Roynon Museum of Paleontology, which he has been operating without a business license from his backyard garage since 2000. As long as no outside visitors are coming to his home, Roynon will now be viewed as a private collector by the City of Escondido.

The collection could now be donated whole to an established museum or sold off in pieces at any time. A T-rex dinosaur skeleton, named Sue, was purchased by the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History for more than $8 million in 1997.

“It looks to be a fairly extensive collection of privately purchased casts and fossils, but based on the photos [on Roynon’s website] I've seen, I would certainly NOT put that in the same category as the Field Museum in Chicago,” suggested Neil Kelley of the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Paleobiology in Washington DC.

Redlitz insisted that the city knew nothing about Roynon opening his home and selling tickets to view his extensive fossil collection until receiving a formal complaint from Ronyon’s close neighbor last year.

“A business that brings in traffic congestion and has children assembled in a small space violates all sorts of fire and safety regulations,” stated Lowry.

Roynon, 76, a retired antiques dealer, has a different vision: he wants to start up a whole new museum within a commercial or educational setting in North County San Diego.

“We are not in a rush to get the doors back open,” said Jeannie Nutter, another neighbor who sits on the museum’s board of directors. “We want to do it right.”

Palomar College, the Escondido Center for the Performing Arts, and the San Diego Children’s Museum have all been approached to consider housing the collection, according to Nutter. “[Roynon] doesn’t take a salary or charge rent for his garage,” claims Nutter. “It’s all about the kids; he wants to educate them.”

But Nutter admitted that finding the estimated $10 million needed to fund the operation independently will be a tough choice. Donation or sale seems to be the likely outcome after July 1.

Whether donated or sold, the vast collection would have to be first evaluated, both for its monetary value and for whether or not the pieces in Roynon’s possession may be in violation of current international standards, or whether they have been taken from federal lands.

“Whereas some countries have strict laws stating that fossils from their land must remain in the respective countries, there are also laws and regulations concerning fossils from U.S. public lands,” stated Kenshu Shimada, professor of biology and environmental science at DePaul University in Chicago.