What's Inside a Bowling Ball? 15 Cross-Sections That Reveal a Hidden World

Ever wondered what's really inside a bowling ball or a rattlesnake's rattle? A viral trend of cross-section photos is satisfying our collective curiosity, revealing the surprisingly complex and beautiful interiors of everyday objects. These images slice through the mundane to show us a world we rarely get to see.

The Anatomy of Nature

One of the most stunning examples is the Fukang meteorite, found in China in 2000. At approximately 4.5 billion years old—nearly the age of Earth itself—this pallasite meteorite is a stony-iron hybrid filled with olivine crystals. Its cross-section looks like cosmic stained glass.

The inside of a pearl is just as mesmerizing, showing the concentric layers of nacre that a mollusk builds around an irritant. Meanwhile, a wasp nest, constructed from chewed tree bark, reveals an intricate hexagonal architecture that rivals any human engineering feat.

The Guts of Human Engineering

Man-made objects offer their own sense of wonder. A cross-section of a main cable from the Golden Gate Bridge displays a dense bundle of 27,572 individual wires, the source of the iconic structure's immense strength. The humble bowling ball contains a surprisingly strange, asymmetric weight block inside, designed to give the ball its spin and momentum.

A modern CT scanner, a machine designed to see inside things, is itself a maze of complex wiring and rotating machinery. There's a certain irony in seeing its own interior revealed. Even a firework shell's cross-section is a masterclass in design, with its 'stars' carefully arranged to create specific patterns when it explodes in the night sky.