Day of the Hunters

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"Day of the Hunters" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It was published in the November 1950 issue of Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories, edited by Robert W Lowndes, and based on an earlier story, Big Game, written many years earlier, not published and assumed to have been lost until discovered in the author's collected papers at Boston University.

A group of technicians in a bar meet whom they assume to be a drunken down-and-out. It slowly emerges that he's an ex-university professor who has not only built a time machine but has traveled back to the Mesozoic era to see for himself what happened to cause extinction of the dinosaurs.

Slowly getting more drunk and belligerent, he comes out with the story that all the large lizards had already vanished and the only ones left were small dinosaurs armed with guns, who are systematically wiping out their own kind until there are none left to kill.

As in many of his stories, the author was influenced by the then-current fear of nuclear war caused by fission bombs created by the Soviet Union and the USA.