shrink-wrap

A plastic film that is used to protect an item and which during application contracts so it tightly enclose it.

Please order another five rolls of shrink-wrap from the supply house.

The wrapping around an item that has been shrink-wrapped.

Please don't damage the shrink-wrap when you are boxing up the items for shipment.

To apply shrink-wrap to (an item).

We spent all day shrink-wrapping boxes and now my feet hurt.

To reconstruct an extinct creature known from its fossils by depicting it with minimal soft tissue, yielding a thinner and less accurate representation of the creature.

Such shrink-wrapped models gave generations of schoolchildren mental images of dinosaurs that are probably much uglier and scrawnier than the creatures were in reality.