Dino Cube first mass-produced version had pictures of dinosaurs depicted on each piece, which led to the adoption of the puzzle's current name of "Dino Cube". It is not known what the puzzle had been called before this dinosaur version was introduced. The later versions, however, adopted the practice of using standard single-colour stickers, in common with most other twisty puzzles. The Dino Cube is a twisty puzzle in the shape of a cube. It consists of 12 movable pieces, all of which are located on the edges of the cube. The puzzle can be thought of as twisting around its corners:
Rubik's Cube pair of edges while leaving the others intact. Some algorithms do have a certain desired effect on the cube (for example, swapping two corners) but may also have the side-effect of changing other parts of the cube (such as permuting some edges). Such algorithms are often simpler than the ones without side-effects and are employed early on in the solution when most of the puzzle has not yet been solved and the side-effects are not important. Most are long and difficult to memorise. Towards the end of the solution, the more specific (and usually more complicated) algorithms are used instead.