You can cut, copy, and paste animations of characters, skeletons, and other objects to objects in another scene. Animation on the keys clipboard is persistent across File > New Scene and File > Open Scene, which means you can load a scene with animation and copy it, and then open another scene with the same character and paste the animation onto it.
You can also copy and paste keys between different editors and windows in Maya. For example, keys cut to the clipboard with a Cut operation in the Graph Editor can be pasted onto an object in the scene view using Edit > Keys > Paste Keys.