MASS MASCOT EXTINCTION FEARED AS SEA LEVELS RISE

The ravages of climate change have struck the American South in advance of Hurrican Florence's landfall. Rising sea levels have driven the University of Misissippi's beloved Rebel Bear to local extinction, creating a new ecological niche :

This is the second loss of a key Mississippi mascot species in a decade. 

The Rebel Bear  drove the indigenous Colonel Reb to extinction in 2010, before the anadromous Gulf of Mexico Land Shark appeared in the wake of the Asiatic Carp invasion that has ravaged the habitat of so many catfish, crawdads, & Tennessee shad.