They probably had an illustrator already availabile and didn't want to make an unrealistic secondary model while fighting the modeling/rendering toolchain to do so.
"The Rise & Fall of the Dinosaurs" by Steve Brusatte is a great book that describes chronologically the beginning of dinosaurs through their end - by means of a young scientist telling about his various digs in his own (non-chronologically) experience. One thing I found important and unique about it was that it put the dinosaurs in the context of their geological environment.
It's relatively up to date, easily accessible, teaches quite a bit, and is fun.
You're in luck. We have 2 such books today. Other than "Rise & Fall of Dinosaurs" mentioned, "Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology" is a good one too.
I just finished reading the first couple of volumes of Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe and have learned a lot about dinosaurs from that.
I wonder: since we have skeletons of living species, and the living animals themselves, couldn't we theoretically train a model to go from bones to pictures of the animal (or 3D models or whatever), and then apply it to dinosaur skeletons to see what comes up? Is there any way that could end up getting us somewhat realistic depictions?
On top of what the article says, even if we had pristine dinosaur DNA, the way we clone things is through a living host - so whatever we'd clone would be half-dinosaur, half-cow, or half-whatever animal volunteered a womb/egg.
Not necessarily half. There'd definitely be some sharing but when we clone things we replace the genome in the egg that's used. That said it'll share mitochondrial and other things during development
Honestly, that end section with illustrations and links (I presume to her blog posts) is some of the prettiest web desin I've seen. Glad to see the creator of Sci-Hub is so skilled, her service has helped me out many times.
