Jeffrey Bruneau smiles with delight at his brother (off camera) as he opens a case containing a raptor claw fossil as his father, Tom, looks on.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

PORTSMOUTH — Jeffrey Bruneau’s parents explained that he could go anywhere on his one wish — Disney World or Hawaii — or have anything he wanted, within reason.

Eight-year-old Jeffrey, a Jurassic Park fan, was adamant. He wanted a real raptor claw. And if he couldn’t have one of those, he wanted a saber tooth from a saber-toothed cat.

Thanks to A Wish Come True, Jeffrey now has both — and a couple of dinosaur teeth for good measure.

Last night, Jeffrey received his treasures from Rosemary Bowers, founder of A Wish Come True, which grants wishes to children battling life-threatening illnesses.

Jeffrey, in the third grade at the Melville Elementary School, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, after he broke his leg late last summer, according to his father, Tom.

Seated on his living-room couch, Jeffrey pored over the contents of a shadow box containing the four artifacts.

The smile stretching across his face and lighting up his eyes said it all.

One by one, he held individual display cases that protected each relic.

The deadly toe claw of the velociraptor, the “raptor” portrayed in the Jurassic Park movies, is only a few inches long, something that did not surprise the budding collector.

Hollywood took a lot of license with the size of the raptors in the movie, portraying them as giants with claws the size of bananas, fossil dealer John McNamara said by phone yesterday.

McNamara, a principal in Paleo Direct of Altamonte Springs, Fla., said the real raptors stood about waist high.

But as Bowers told Jeffrey last night, “They could rip apart a human in 30 seconds.”

“They traveled in packs,” she said.

“I know,” said Jeffrey with a satisfied smile and a gleam in his eye, pausing from his concentrated gaze at the fossils in his lap to steal a glance at Bowers.

Beverly Molles, a representative of A Wish Come True, put in three days of research to track down the raptor claw, which the organization bought from McNamara at a discount. McNamara also donated two dinosaur teeth, one from a raptor and another from a triceratops.

All three artifacts came from the Hell Creek Formation, in South Dakota, the same general area where paleontologists discovered “Sue,” the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found. Sue now presides over the main gallery at the Field Museum, in Chicago.

Jeffrey’s dinosaur artifacts came from animals that “all saw T rex in their lifetime,” McNamara said.

Molles didn’t have quite as much luck with the saber-tooth, which is so rare that the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., was not willing to part with any part of its collection. .

But the dinosaur curator, Matthew Carrano, had made a realistic replica of the “killing tooth” of a saber-toothed cat. Several inches long, the replica was molded from a cast of a fossil discovered in 1927 in the La Brea Tarpits of Los Angeles.

LaBrea is the site of one of the richest and best-preserved concentrations of vertebrates from the Pleistocene Age, which spanned a period 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago.

At one point last night , Jeffrey looked up from his collection at his stepmother, Karen.

“No, you can’t put it under your pillow,” she said with a laugh, as if she were reading his thoughts.

Jeffrey said he would settle for the table next to his bed.

gmacris@projo.com