Realized that Ubuntu 16.04 shipped with an old version of Blender.
You can install the latest stable version from this ppa https://launchpad.net/~thomas-schiex/+archive/ubuntu/blender
Basically:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install blender
If you already have installed the older version from Ubuntu replace last line with sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y