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.

I want to take it one step further.

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.

Hippos will absolutely fuck you up, though.

Fun fact, the reason some dinosaurs are depicted with lips is because the asymetrical wear on their teeth doesn't match with modern equivalent's that have exposed teeth, meaning they had "labial scale" lips.

Image owned by Mark P. Witton

Hippos are so friend shaped it's unfair.

Holy shit, this is exactly this book:

All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals

There was a great podcast that pointed me to it: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/welcome-to-jurassic-art-redux/transcript/

I think that's it. I've already done more searching than I intended to get the name of the book. You're on your own.

I wanted to be an archeologist when I was a kid because I loved dinos. This book speaks to me.

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.

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.