A giant stuffed walrus is among the weird and wonderful exhibits on their way to Margate for a new exhibition opening at the Turner Contemporary this month.

Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing will see the seaside gallery become a cabinet of curiosities, with contemporary art situated alongside historical artefacts.

Pieces will include the absurdly over-stuffed Horniman Museum walrus, which was brought to London by the Victorian hunter James Henry Hubbard, who collected it from Hudson Bay in Canada.

It will be the first time is has moved since it was bought by Frederick Horniman in the early 1890s, and put on display at his museum in London.

Other historical artefacts include intricate pen and ink studies by Leonardo da Vinci; Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated Rhinoceros woodcut, created in 1515; beautiful bird studies by the gallery’s namesake JMW Turner; late 19th century models of aquatic creatures by German glassmakers Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka; the mineral collection of Roger Caillois from the Natural History Museum in Paris, the diarist and botanist John Evelyn’s cabinet, ivory anatomical models from the 17th and 18th centuries, Robert Hooke’s Micrographiawith its startingly detailed illustration of a flea, and a penguin collected from one of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions from the Powell-Cotton Museum in Birchington-on-Sea.

There will also be works by contemporary artists including Katie Paterson, Pablo Bronstein, Tacita Dean and Gerard Byrne.

Curator Brian Dillon said: "‘Like the cabinet of curiosities of the 17th century, which mixed science and art, ancient and modern, reality and fiction, this exhibition refuses to choose between knowledge and pleasure. It juxtaposes historical periods and categories of objects to produce an eccentric map of curiosity in its many senses."

A playful, informative book with essays by Mr Dillon and Marina Warner will accompany the exhibition, available from our shop.

It opens at the gallery on Fridy, May 24 and runs until September 15. Admission to the gallery is free. Visit www.turnercontemporary.org or call 01843 233000.