is there any way to track/trace a junkyard engine/motor?

Question

didn't know i had a junkyard engine in my car until the engine blew recently and i have to replace it. 2 shops have independently verified that the engine is in fact a junkyard engine, due to the yellow digits scrawled on it that would identify it as such.

will i be able to track where that engine came from? or if i'm not "privvy" to that information because i'm joe-nobody, would a government group (ie: DMV etc) be able to do that?

i know i can probably take the serial number off the old engine and at least find out some history that way, through the auto manufacturer. i know that will take a lot of time though but i have to do something.

oh and FYI, i have done a carfax report on it and there is a 4-year gap of no vehicle history reported, but 65,000 miles accumulated. the services i've had done to it are on there - purchase, title transfer, emissions etc.

a bit odd?

thank you.

for the first responder:

something should've gotten registered at emissions at the very least.

also, the original owner wasn't a single person. the report states that the vehicle was registered as a "fleet vehicle".

Answer 1

Not odd. The car probably had nothing to report. The previous owner did his own work. As far as engine the best you could hope for is identifing what year car the engine came from.

Answer 2

Fred Hoyle made himself a universal laughing stock when he came out with that little gem about a tornado in a junkyard assembling a Jumbo Jet. As an astronomer he makes a very poor Evolutionary Biologist or (more surprisingly, perhaps) Mathematician. He seems to have forgotten that to in any way equate to his analogy the tornado would have to blow through a junkyard covering the entire planet for a billion years and that every time two parts that belonged together touched they stayed linked. Such accumulation is much more akin to the processes that occurred during Abiogenesis and early Evolution.

Answer 3

you could go to your local DMV office and depending where you live they may have somebody like a license and theft inspector who could run the vin number on the engine..