Internally we build what we call a "bone rig"
This is a standard joint hierarchy, where we have placed the pivots in the correct anatomical locations and then either skinned or parented the bone geometry to those joints.
(In practice we also end up using Ziva VFX to simulation a number of the actual bones for best results)
This is something in the simple case that you should be able to accomplish with the tools that ship with Maya (or most any DCC for that matter)
I hope this helps!
-jj