The Royal Dutch Shell, popularly known as Shell ( in English, "shell, leaflet" ») is an oil company created in 1907 by the merger of the Dutch N. V . Koninklijke Nederlandse Petroleum Maatschappij (known in English as "Royal Dutch Petroleum Company") and the English Shell Transport and Trading Company Ltd ("Valvas Limited Company of Transport and Trade"). Precisely the latter had started its business as an importer of leaflets and seashells for collectors, which were fashionable in nineteenth-century England, to later become a company for the transport of goods, oil and oil; and the new company kept the original logo (with some stylization) showing a scallop leaflet (Pecten maximus) to which they gave the red and yellow colors representative of American California (which was Spanish possession and had the colors of its flag) where the oil wells were. See venera (oyster).