Nature is pretty cool, and the whole evolution thing that's been going on for waaaaaay longer than the human race has meant that animals have a lot to teach us.

First, we thought the answer to keeping warm was in the whales, with thick layers of blubber keeping them insulated against the Antarctic waters of, well, Antarctica. We duplicated their fat with neoprene, and it worked pretty well. Still today, wetsuits are made from Neoprene, but that's not the latest and the greatest. A couple of years ago, the rage was all Bamboo and Charcoal. That felt furry, kept you warm and stopped the water leaking in. Gore Tex, sonic welding, you name it, and the big surf brands have given wetsuits a crack with it.

Now, it's back to nature (well, back again after the Bamboo/Charcoal craze) and this time it's not the whales, it's the Beavers. Their fur keeps them uber warm, so the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have worked towards creating a synthetic beaver skin wetsuit. Spawned from a trip to Taiwan, Anette (Peko) Hosoi, a professor of mechanical engineering and associate head of the department at MIT explains: "We are particularly interested in wetsuits for surfing, where the athlete moves frequently between air and water environments. We can control the length, spacing, and arrangement of hairs, which allows us to design textures to match certain dive speeds and maximize the wetsuit's dry region."

The science behind it would take thousands of words to explain, so here's a video that does it better. Would you buy a furry wetsuit if it kept you warmer? Watch this and find out!

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