And no, I don't care if there's good reason to believe that Tyrannosaurs weren't fluffy like owls, I still want a decent artist's depiction of a T. rex with owl-level fluff.
The reason for the stretched skin look for dinosaurs initially is because of the comparison to lizards, who do frequently have their skin stretched on their bones except in a few places. Unfortunately things like that have momentum, so changing it takes even longer than it took to catch on.
I'm still pissed at Jurassic World cowardly going with the old designs when they could have shown the current knowledge, much like the original movie has.
I haven't watched Jurassic World, but wasn't that kinda explained with the frog DNA? I heard something to that effect. Meaning that they knew they weren't like the original animals.
Eh, in universe it fits the continuity. They're not dinosaurs, they're lab created animals that fit an inaccurate public perception of dinosaurs . Corpos keep corping, why mess with a winning formula
An interesting book on why many dinosaur depictions are wrong and what they may have looked like.
The hippos teeth peg it as a mostly vegetation, so depictions would favor that line.
The term "artist" here is being used kind of loosely. They're doing the bare minimum you need to turn a skeleton into a living creature. Good artistic representations require a lot more imagination, beyond what we scientifically know. You can get clues by looking at already existing animals and how they relate to their skeletons. Which gives an idea of how much not bone material those creatures might have. No you won't know exactly how much they did, but that's not really being represented by skin wrapping either is it. Better to try and go for something believable rather than the bare minimum.
Uh, go and look at most artistic renders of dinosaurs. So much so that people now actively reaist attempts at more accurate depictions. This is very much truth in meme, in fact it's exactly what they're sporking.