The standard ASL sign for “dinosaur” uses a flattened “O” handshape on your dominant hand to represent the dinosaur’s head. Your non-dominant arm acts as the ground, and your dominant hand bounces along it in small steps, mimicking a dinosaur walking past you. It’s a visual, intuitive sign that becomes even more expressive once you understand how it works in context.
The Standard Sign Step by Step
Start by holding your non-dominant arm out in front of your body, roughly horizontal. This arm represents the ground or baseline. With your dominant hand, form a flattened “O” handshape: bring all your fingertips together with your thumb so they touch, but keep the shape slightly flat rather than rounded. This handshape represents the dinosaur’s head.
Now place your dominant hand above your non-dominant arm and move it forward while bouncing it gently up and down, as if the dinosaur is taking heavy steps. The movement travels from one side to the other in front of you. Think of it as showing a large creature lumbering across a landscape. The bouncing motion is key: it’s what separates this sign from other animal signs and gives it the weight and rhythm of something massive walking.
Why the Sign Looks the Way It Does
ASL is a highly visual language, and the dinosaur sign works because it paints a picture. The flattened “O” handshape suggests the head and neck of a large reptile, while your base arm gives the viewer a sense of scale and ground. The bobbing movement imitates the lumbering gait of a creature walking on powerful legs. You’re essentially acting out a tiny scene rather than spelling out a word, which is how many ASL signs for animals work.
You may also encounter a variation where both hands form “claw 3” handshapes (fingers spread and slightly curled, thumbs out) placed on the sides of the chest, alternating up and down twice. This version emphasizes the dinosaur’s large body and short arms. Both versions are used, so don’t be surprised if you see either one in different classrooms or conversations.
Turning the Sign Into a Classifier
One of the most useful things about the dinosaur sign is how easily it transitions into a classifier, which ASL uses to show what something is doing rather than just naming it. Once you’ve established that you’re talking about a dinosaur (by signing it the standard way, or because the topic is already obvious), you can drop your non-dominant arm entirely. Your dominant hand, still in that flattened “O” shape, now becomes free to move around in space and show exactly what the dinosaur is doing.
With just that one hand, you can depict a dinosaur eating leaves from a tall tree by reaching the handshape upward, or show two dinosaurs fighting by using both hands as separate dinosaur “heads” moving toward each other. You can show a dinosaur walking slowly, running, or looking around. This is where ASL storytelling really comes alive, especially with kids, who tend to love the expressive, physical nature of these depictive signs.
The flattened “O” classifier falls into a broader category in ASL used for animals with long necks, including giraffes, swans, geese, and cobras. The shared handshape makes sense visually: it captures the idea of a head at the end of an extended neck.
Signing Specific Types of Dinosaurs
The standard sign covers “dinosaur” as a general concept. But if you’re telling a story about specific species, you can modify the handshape to reflect their distinct features. For a triceratops, you might use a modified “3” or “W” handshape with fingers pointing mostly forward, suggesting the horns on the dinosaur’s head. For a stegosaurus or another dinosaur with spikes running down its back, you could switch to a flat hand along the spine to represent those plates or ridges.
These modified signs aren’t replacements for the general “dinosaur” sign. They’re descriptive tools you’d use after you’ve already set the scene and your conversation partner knows you’re discussing dinosaurs. Think of them as adjectives built into the sign itself: they tell the viewer not just “dinosaur” but “this particular kind of dinosaur.”
Tips for Getting It Right
The most common mistake beginners make is keeping the movement too stiff or too fast. The bouncing motion should feel natural and rhythmic, like footsteps with real weight behind them. Let your wrist stay loose. The dinosaur isn’t in a hurry.
Another thing to keep in mind is that your non-dominant arm doesn’t need to be perfectly straight or rigid. It just needs to be there as a reference point. Some signers angle it slightly or hold it at different heights depending on the story they’re telling. If the dinosaur is walking on flat ground, the arm stays level. If it’s climbing a hill, you might angle it upward.
If you’re learning this sign to use with a child, start with the full two-handed version to establish the word clearly. Once the child recognizes it, you can move into the one-handed classifier form and start acting out little dinosaur stories. The transition from vocabulary sign to storytelling tool is one of the things that makes ASL so engaging for young learners.