A three-year, 10,000-kilometre journey on horseback from Mongolia to Europe would leave even the hardiest of adventurers saddle-sore.

But Tim Cope says he had greater concerns than his haunches during his three-year epic journey following the trail of Genghis Khan.

"If I had a sore bum that was the least of my worries," Cope says. "I was more worried about keeping my horses away from thieves, wolves and avoiding injury."

Cope also faced labyrinthine bureaucracy during his journey, which he began in June 2004, through the former Soviet Union with three horses and his dog Tigon.

"It was massive, mostly because no one's trying to cross a border with a horse these days," he says. "As an Australian, there was often suspicion that I was a spy or a horse rustler or a vodka trader."

However, Cope says he was also greeted with immense hospitality by the people he encountered, such as a family in remote Kazakhstan during the height of summer.

"They took me into their underground hut to keep cool and kept me going with fermented camel's milk and took the horses off to water," he says. "I was genuinely treated like a long lost son."

Cope is one of the explorers featured in the Australian Museum's new exhibition, Trailblazers: Australia's 50 Greatest Explorers.

The show features adventurers, past and present, ranging from James Cook to Kay Cottee ("riding the waves"), Burke and Wills to Tim Flannery ("trekking the wilds") as well as mountaineers, aviators and polar explorers including the museum's "trailblazer-in-residence" Tim Jarvis.

Also featured is a former director of the Museum, Gerard Krefft, who was sacked by the board of trustees and physically removed from the museum building in 1874 for supporting Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

The exhibition draws from the museum's 18 million artefacts, and features more than 360 artefacts, including the coat given to Captain Cook in Hawaii and a 100-year-old traditional silver-plated wooden saddle brought back from Kazakhstan by Cope.

Curator Howard Whelan says explorers initially set out to conquer peoples and commandeer resources before the age of enlightenment fostered a quest for scientific discoveries alongside the search for minerals, spices, timber and slaves.

"Today's adventurers 'push the boundaries' of a particular pursuit," he says. "I think this is a good thing as it keeps alive our ability to take responsible risks, to face danger, to evolve. These are crucial attributes as we push on to other planets."

Cope's other adventures include riding a bicycle from Moscow to Beijing and rowing the length of a Siberian river.

"In the modern world, adventure is a vehicle to understand people, societies and cultures that are very different from our world and reflect on our own culture and assumptions," he says.

An expert panel led by Whelan selected 29 historical explorers and 21 contemporary adventurers who, in their opinion, made significant discoveries or pushed the boundary of a particular pursuit: "We also looked for those that inspired others and influenced what it is to be Australian."

An adventurer and founding editor of Australian Geographic, Whelan says some choices may be contentious, including Bennelong and Burke and Wills – "they died because their narrow-mindedness wouldn't allow them to take the advice of the Aboriginals who strived to save them".

The show features only a few Indigenous explorers, which Whelan puts down to the challenge of cultures with an oral history only. But he says credit is given to the Aboriginal people who made much of the early European exploration of Australia possible.

There are also more men than women in the exhibition, although the gender ratio has improved in modern times, Whelan says. "Today adventurers like Linda Beilharz​ prove that women can be just as tough as men in the most extreme environments on Earth."

Trailblazers: Australia's 50 greatest explorers is at the Australian Museum from November 28 to July 18, 2016.