An upper bound for the “sausage catastrophe” of dense sphere packings in 4-space is given.A basic problem in the theory of finite packing is to determine, for a given positive integer k, the minimal volume of all convex bodies into which k translates of the unit ball B^d of the Euclidean d-dimensional space E^d can be packed ([5]). For d = 2 this problem was solved by Groemer ([6]).