Reverse engineering

Another noob question and I'm not sure if it should be asked here or in scripting, but here goes.
Is it possible to reverse engineer an animated object? For example, one of the free objects I picked up was flame/fire. It says that I'm free to modify it, but when I open it to edit it, the only thing I can do is alter the shape and size of the images. But where are the images themselves? Is there a way to alter their appearance?

If there were no textures in the object's contents, the images are being set inside the script. If you have edit access to the script, you can find them and change them to the UUID's of the textures you want to show.

Those images were likely programmed into the prim by a script. For example, a script might have been used to load the flame textures via a key... Keys are unique ID numbers for things such as textures, sounds, prims, and other people.

Then, after setting the textures with the script, the script probably ran the llSetTextureAnim() function... the function animates the texture like a cartoon (several frames of texture playing in sequence). And because that function sets a property of the prim object, the function only needs to execute once. So, the script could've been deleted with the texture animation continueing to play.

A link to the llSetTextureAnim() script function info:
http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=llSetTextureAnim

Or the creator may have just applied those textures using the build tools.