adding animations to existing meshes

i have an idle animation for my character. I started a new .max file and i made a second animation. I know i can export another mesh for the second animation.. but is there a way i can add this new animation to my already existing animation? So i dont have multiple meshes in memory?

If you have the Pro version, you can export as external .anim files, and automatically load the animations to your animated character as needed in your application

Or you can use the shareSkeleton support of Ogre to load just the skeleton and share the animations with other animated charactes

Or you can manually edit the skeleton file (convert to XML) and add the animations