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Very few book cover artists come even that close to the characters or scenes they're depicting. I've read books where they get things as far off as putting blond hair on a character described multiple times as having brown hair.
Michael Whelan was one of the most accurate cover artists. His depiction of the floating city on "The Ringworld Engineers" can be used as a map while you're reading that part. He also did the best covers for Anne McCaffrey's Pern series.
Then there's the majority of the covers for the Man-Kzin wars anthologies. In spite of multiple descriptions of the Kzinti having hairless, ratlike tails, three fingers and a thumb and hairless ears with jointed bones like bat wings which can curl into protective balls - most of the artists just paint up bipedal kitty cats with normal cat ears and five fingered hands, and most often normal cat tails.
Why don't most cover artists make it a point of pride in their work to show how attentive they are to the details of what they're painting? I'd think that should be among the top criteria for publishers when they decide who to hire to do cover art.
At least it's not like so many books back in the 70's and 80's... "Hey! Abstract colored blobs crossed with bold diagonal slashes! That really fits this Martian SciFi thriller, right? Let's go with this instead of that boringly accurate painting. It has too much blah reddish dirt."
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