So how does this animate a mesh? Well every vertex in a mesh is assigned to one or more bones which affects it's position when the bone is moved. If a vertex is assigned to more than one bone, then weights must be assigned to determine how much each bone affects the vertex (actually a weight of 1.0 is used for single bone assignments). Weighted vertex assignments are especially useful around the joints themselves to avoid 'pinching' of the mesh in this region.
Therefore by moving the skeleton using preset animations, we can animate the mesh. The advantage of using skeletal animation is that you store less animation data, especially as vertex counts increase. In addition, you are able to blend multiple animations together (e.g. walking and looking around, running and shooting) and provide smooth transitions between animations without incurring as much of an overhead as would be involved if you did this on the core vertex data.
Skeleton definitions are loaded from datafiles, namely the .xsf file format. They are loaded on demand, especially when referenced by a Mesh.