Over millions of years Nature has attained highly optimized structural designs with remarkable toughness, strength, damage resistance and damage tolerance - properties that are so far difficult to combine in artificial high-performance fibre-reinforced polymers (HPFRPs). Recent studies, which have successfully replicated the structures and especially the toughening mechanisms found in flora and fauna, are reviewed in this work. At the core of the manufacturing of damage-tolerant bio-inspired composites, an understanding of the design principles and mechanisms is key. Universal and naturally-inherent design features, such as hierarchical- and organic-inorganic-structures as well as helical or fibrous arrangements of building blocks were found to promote numerous toughening mechanisms. Common to these features, the outstanding ability of diffusing damage at a sub-critical state has been identified as a powerful and effective mechanism to achieve high damage tolerance. Novel manufacturing processes suitable for HPFRP (such as tailored high-precision tape placement, micro-moulding, laser-engraving and additive manufacturing) have recently gained immense traction in the research community. This stems from the achievable and required geometrical complexity for HPFRPs and the replication of subtly balanced interaction between the material constituents. Even though trends in the literature clearly show that a bio-inspired material design philosophy is a successful strategy to design more efficient composite structures with enhanced damage tolerance and mechanical performance, Nature continues to offer new challenging opportunities yet to be explored, which could lead to a new era of HPFRP composites
