Ancient whales had extremely sharp predator teeth similar to lions, Australian scientists said Wednesday in a discovery they believe debunks theories the mammals used their teeth to filter feed like today’s gentle giants. There are two major groups of whales — toothed creatures such as killer whales, and baleen, which filter plankton and small fish from the ocean for food with special bristle-like structures in their mouths. Using 3D scanners, Museums Victoria and Monash University palaeontologists made digital teeth models of fossil baleen whales and today’s mammals from specimen collections around the world. They found that teeth in ancient baleen whales — the ancestors of the Southern Right and Blue whale — were different to the present-day and were instead much sharper. “These results are the first to show that ancient baleen whales had extremely sharp teeth with one function — cutting the flesh of their prey,” Museums Victoria’s senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology Erich

UNSW Sydney scientists have discovered the purpose of a famous 3700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet, revealing it is the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, possibly used by ancient mathematical scribes to calculate how to construct palaces and temples and build canals. The new research shows the Babylonians, not the Greeks, were the first to study trigonometry – the study of triangles – and reveals an ancient mathematical sophistication that had been hidden until now. Known as Plimpton 322, the small tablet was discovered in the early 1900s in what is now southern Iraq by archaeologist, academic, diplomat and antiquities dealer Edgar Banks, the person on whom the fictional character Indiana Jones was based.