Animate change layer In 2.4 It was possible to move an objet to another layer with keyframe.
"﻿﻿ Changing Object Layer

Many times you want an object or actor to wait off stage until it is their time to come on and do their thing. In Blender, you commonly render only a few of the twenty available layers. So by animating an object’s layer “membership”, you can animate its visibility in the 3D views (avoiding it to clutter your workspace) and at render time. Furthermore, as you can set some lamps to illuminate only objects on their layer, changing an object’s layer can also be a way to change radically its lighting…
Changing from layer 4 to 10 and 14 at frame 10.

To animate an object’s layer membership, go to the frame when you want the object to appear. Ensure the object is on a visible layer (M to see and move it between layers). Insert (I) an Ipo key, and choose Layer in the menu that pops-up. In your Ipo Curve Editor window, you will see that the Layer channel now has a value corresponding to the current layer. Back up one frame, move the object to an unselected (invisible) layer. Now, here’s a slight glitch: you cannot add a Layer key because the object is on an unselected layer. So, temporarily enable that layer by ⇧ Shift-selecting it from the layers buttons, insert another Layer key, and then de-select the undesired layer. "

How to do that on 2.77 ????

Dji
If your only concern is animating the visibility of the object, you can do this easily by keyframing the Restrict Viewport Visibility toggle for the object in the Outliner.