c - Nodes as a pointer

Question

Why the nodes in a linked list are declared as pointers? Nodes contains the pointer part in it to link to another node. Then why the nodes are itself a pointer?

struct node
{
    int data;
    struct node *link;
} *start;

Now we introduce nodes as

struct node *tmp;

Now this is a node which is a pointer to data type struct node..but for linking we use the link pointer to link the other node Why dindnt we coded node as

struct node tmp;

only...is this because of allocating dynamic memory..or something more?

Answer 1

Yes, this is because the nodes are allocated dynamically.